At Wembley in 2009, in the final match of Guus Hiddink’s previous spell at Chelsea, the manager took an age to surface from the dressing room after signing off with an FA Cup-winning victory over Everton. There had been African dancing with the players and the owner, he explained, he had been presented with an expensive watch and down in the bowels of the stadium the party was still going on.
“It was almost a perfect goodbye,” Hiddink said. “It would have been completely perfect if we had been somewhere else a few days ago. I would have loved to have played Manchester United.”
The somewhere else Hiddink would have liked to have been was Rome three days earlier, where Barcelona had just beaten Manchester United in a one-sided Champions League final. The same Barcelona that Hiddink’s Chelsea had come so close to putting out at the semi-final stage, when only some extraordinary refereeing decisions and a stoppage-time equaliser earned Pep Guardiola’s team passage to the final on an infamous night in London. Hiddink’s inference was doubly clear. Chelsea should have been in the final, it was widely accepted that they suffered an injustice at the hands of the Norwegian referee Tom Henning Ovrebo, and once in Rome he would have backed his side to reverse the Moscow result of the previous year and beat the holders.
He might have been right, too. United did not play all that well in the final and Chelsea were on an almost unstoppable roll, winning 11 of their last 13 league games and overwhelming Everton. It will never be proven because Hiddink never got to play against United the last time round. Both the league fixtures had been completed by the time he took over from Luiz Felipe Scolari on Valentine’s Day, and while the FA Cup shaped up for a while to feature another Chelsea-United showdown in the final, Sir Alex Ferguson miscalculated in the semi, weakening his side by leaving out Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, and Everton sneaked past them on penalties.
It could be said that Hiddink has his chance to tick that empty box this season, except that in the space of half a dozen or so years the landscape has changed utterly. Back in 2009, Chelsea and United were the biggest beasts in Europe. Barcelona were soon to challenge that supremacy but Guardiola’s tiki-taka treble might have had to wait had Uefa supplied a more experienced official at Stamford Bridge. The conspiracy theory at the time that Uefa wanted to avoid a second successive all-English final was probably nonsense, yet revealing all the same. By 2009 an English side had been in the Champions League final for five years running. In Moscow in 2008 there had been two of them, and the last four a season later featured three Premier League teams, United putting out Arsenal in the semi-final.
So when Hiddink said he was sorry not to have been able to play United, he was practically talking in terms of the heavyweight championship of the world. It is not quite like that now, as will be all too apparent when United travel to Midtjylland of Denmark for a Europa League tie this month. England is no longer where it is at, and even within the Premier League the Chelsea-United nexus fails to compel. United are five points away from a place in the top four while Chelsea are not even in the top half of the table.
When the teams met at Old Trafford at the end of last year a 0-0 draw was seized on gratefully by both clubs; United because defeat at Stoke a few days earlier had put Louis van Gaal’s immediate future at the club under intense scrutiny, Chelsea because they had just been held at home by Watford and were still trying to stabilise following José Mourinho’s departure.
Chelsea have just been held by Watford again, whereas United have won two in a row, scored six goals and played some sparkling football in the past few days.
That was Van Gaal’s description, at any rate, and although Stoke were uncharacteristically limp in midweek the manager was right about the quality of some of United’s play. He rates Hiddink as an opponent – “since he got there Chelsea have stopped losing” – but does not pretend any great friendship. “Professional” was the single word he used to sum up the relationship between the pair over the years. “Under Hiddink Chelsea could still climb up the table to the European positions,” Van Gaal said. “It looks impossible but mathematically he could still do it.”
The United manager still expects his own side to climb the table too. While talk of winning the title after victory at Liverpool was put into perspective by the disappointing home defeat to Southampton in the next match, Van Gaal is still clear about what he wants from this season and what would represent progress.
“We must qualify for the Champions League and we would like to finish higher than we did last year, so third place is the least we must aim for,” he explained. “Where we are at the moment is not bad but it could be better. We had a painful December when circumstances [injuries] were against us but after losing four matches in a row the run we are on now is remarkable. In the last two games we have played with much more confidence. We still have a five-point gap to make up but I believe we can do it.
“We have maybe the best organised defence in the Premier League and now we are scoring goals, plus we have important players coming back. Phil Jones, Marcos Rojo and Antonio Valencia are all nearly ready to return, so there is light at the end of the tunnel. But to close the gap we have to keep winning.”
Van Gaal might have suffered a few setbacks in his quest to return Manchester United to the heavyweight division, though to his credit he still talks like a champ. He just needs his players to continue backing him up with their best shots.